The Peninsula Hotels' 'Art in Resonance' Program Arrives in Paris
Robb Report
Christina LiaoTwo never-before-seen pieces by female artists will be on view until November 15.
Elise Morin knows you're not coming to the Peninsula Paris because you're looking for her art—and she's happy about that.
Yesterday, the 41-year-old French artist, whose work often invokes the natural environment and the material burden art places on it, debuted her latest piece at the hotel—an undulating, polygenic sculpture made of CD fragments—alongside immersive projections by Japan-born, New York City-based artist Saya Woolfalk and a neon sculpture by Chilean artist Iván Navarro. The three artists' works (on view until November 15) are part of the latest installment in the Peninsula's multi-year art commissioning program, "Art in Resonance," which officially kicked off at the Peninsula Hong Kong (to coincide with Art Basel Hong Kong) this past March.
The works are publicly accessible; Morin and Navarro's pieces are on view in the entrance lobby of the Peninsula Paris, while Woolfalk's are displayed in a small salon just off of it. Their placement is purposefully democratic and free for all to engage with. For Morin, whose art speaks to issues like consumption and overproduction, that's a good thing. "I'm interested in the fact that the people who will see the piece are not necessarily people who have intentionally come to see it," she says. "I'm curious to see how people will react to it, whether they'll be attracted to the piece, and what they make of it."
The piece, "Soli," is a three-dimensional landscape rendered in pulverized discs stitched together over a steel frame, to wave-like effect: an unnatural object that nonetheless recalls nature. (Viewers who saw her piece, "Glowing Memories #2," on view at Exposition Post-Carbone in Paris in 2015, will recognize the technique.)
Elise Morin knows you're not coming to the Peninsula Paris because you're looking for her art—and she's happy about that.
Yesterday, the 41-year-old French artist, whose work often invokes the natural environment and the material burden art places on it, debuted her latest piece at the hotel—an undulating, polygenic sculpture made of CD fragments—alongside immersive projections by Japan-born, New York City-based artist Saya Woolfalk and a neon sculpture by Chilean artist Iván Navarro. The three artists' works (on view until November 15) are part of the latest installment in the Peninsula's multi-year art commissioning program, "Art in Resonance," which officially kicked off at the Peninsula Hong Kong (to coincide with Art Basel Hong Kong) this past March.
The works are publicly accessible; Morin and Navarro's pieces are on view in the entrance lobby of the Peninsula Paris, while Woolfalk's are displayed in a small salon just off of it. Their placement is purposefully democratic and free for all to engage with. For Morin, whose art speaks to issues like consumption and overproduction, that's a good thing. "I'm interested in the fact that the people who will see the piece are not necessarily people who have intentionally come to see it," she says. "I'm curious to see how people will react to it, whether they'll be attracted to the piece, and what they make of it."
The piece, "Soli," is a three-dimensional landscape rendered in pulverized discs stitched together over a steel frame, to wave-like effect: an unnatural object that nonetheless recalls nature. (Viewers who saw her piece, "Glowing Memories #2," on view at Exposition Post-Carbone in Paris in 2015, will recognize the technique.)
For Morin, the material is imbued with multiple layers of meaning. It's a receptacle of people's private information, and broader cultural ideas—"an object both of collective memory and individual memory"—and an emblem of a culture that has little regard for waste, creating things in excess only to see them destroyed. (Many of the discs are unsold CDS that otherwise would have been incinerated; instead, they were sent to a recycling plant in Le Havre, an industrial port city in northwestern France, where they were crushed up and given to Morin to repurpose in her art.) That the disc is something of a dead object, whose limited lifespan is clear from the outset, is another reason for Morin's interest. "The CD is produced with a realistic duration of about 40 years," she says. "It's planned for obsolescence."
And the very thing that makes Morin's work a thing of beauty—light, reflected off the discs—also destroys it. (The discs are light-sensitive, and exposure to it deletes their contents.) Altogether, "Soli" offers a rumination on many things, the lifespan of objects and their environmental burden on the planet foremost among them.
The show's opening comes amid a series of global climate strikes meant to draw international attention toward the issue ahead of an emergency summit at the U.N. But Morin isn't hopping on a trend. "I've been doing this type of work for 20 years," she says. "There is a focus now, in the past two years and especially this week, but to me this is a continuation of a slow awakening. There are people who have been doing this, who have been conscious and fighting, for more than 40 years."